Today I’m sharing 11 very hard-fought lessons that we have learned in growing our family law practice.
This was certainly not in my business plan – I didn’t anticipate the coming storm from some of my blunders.
I’m sharing these so you can apply them to your practice and help your firm grow faster from our mistakes and lessons learned.
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Being a leader is your identity
Most of us start as sole practitioners, growing our firms by adding attorneys and staff. But that self-identity – being an excellent lawyer – has to change.
Leadership must become your identity if you’re to grow and scale your firm.
Our mindset must transition from being a lawyer to being a leader who empowers others to pursue their lawyering craft.
The most successful law firm builders make this transition. They’re no longer technicians or craftsmen doing their job as lawyers. They become leaders in growing a firm into business to scale.
This conflict shows up most often in the tension between founding lawyers wanting growth and control.
You simply can’t have both–if your goal is building a large, impactful firm.
You have to give up control to get growth, and that requires self-leadership and identifying as a leader to make it happen.
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Building a law firm is a sprint and a marathon
These two concerns – sprinting and marathoning – represent a massive, never-ending tension. Both must have an equal seat at the table.
It means balancing a sense of urgency with keeping a view over the horizon.
In the micro, that sense of urgency means:
- Returning client phone calls
- Immediately terminating bad behavior employees
- Following up with prospective clients promptly
- Finishing your list of top three tasks of the day
At the same time, you must play the long game:
- Positioning in the marketplace, which takes years to build a brand in potential clients’ minds
- Developing people, which is one of the most difficult things leaders must do
- Being patient with mistakes and helping people learn and improve
- Giving up short-term compensation for much greater long-term gains
- Reinvesting in the firm’s future
That tension between sprinting and marathoning will always be there.
Leaders must maintain both a sense of urgency for the now and for the micro, along with playing the very long game.
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Vulnerability is confidence in action
This might be one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn.
As a leader, having the vulnerability to say “I don’t know” about something that you believe you should know demonstrates true confidence.
The same goes for admitting “I’m not good at that” or quickly acknowledging when you’re wrong.
What makes this even more challenging is identifying when you’re not being vulnerable and need to be.
Most of us judge ourselves by our intentions, while our teammates judge us by what they see us do.
This vulnerability becomes essential as your firm grows.
I’ve never met a teammate who expected their leader to know all the answers. In fact, saying “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” generally inspires more confidence than pretending to know everything.
But it takes time to work through that insecurity and reach that point in your growth.
Without vulnerability, you create a lid on your leadership – and you can only build your firm up to your personal limit.
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Discipline today avoids pain tomorrow
When we started growing, we made two crucial decisions that required upfront discipline.
First, for a client management tool, we chose Salesforce over simpler off-the-shelf solution, such as Clio.
This decision required extensive customization and constant updating. However, over the long term, it has given us access to invaluable data and a competitive advantage.
Second, we converted from hourly billing to fixed fee billing.
The ensuing pain was awful. We knew we’d get “kicked in the mouth” figuring it out. And that is just what happened – for many years.
In the end, aligning our interests with clients through fixed fees has been enormously rewarding, both intrinsically and financially.
Today, we’re 100% fixed fee with strong margins and satisfied clients.
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Leadership isn’t winning your way, it’s clearing the way for teammates
My number one job as CEO of Sterling Lawyers is to remove obstacles for my teammates, helping clear things out of their way.
I am occasionally the most uniquely positioned person in the firm to do this.
Looking back, the best decisions and ideas have almost exclusively come from the teammates doing the work on the front lines. By removing their job obstacles, they had the mental bandwidth to be creative with ways to make the firm more efficient.
This might sound abstract, but it’s essential. If you can clear the way for your team and bring in good people eager to live out your mission, great things will happen.
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Hire to complement, not to get compliments
This starts with knowing your own weaknesses and hiring others who are better at these shortcomings than you.
Beware though. You’re going to need a high degree of personal security to pull this off.
When you hire to complement your weaknesses, others who are better than you will earn respect from teammates and gain more influence than you in specific areas.
If you can’t handle this, you won’t grow.
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Indecision turns temporary pain into chronic pain
One of the strengths of my leadership, and my partner’s leadership, has been decision velocity. We make decisions very fast.
This idea of quick decisions has been an intentional strategic choice.
Having this strength is fantastic, except when you’re super wrong, which we have been.
We’ve had to manage the downside to quick decisions, which have been some remarkably bad decisions that have caused damage and set us back.
Yet we’ve found that moving forward quickly with 60-70% of the information, rather than waiting for 90%+, has enabled us to grow faster.
Imperfect decisions made quickly compound to goodness faster than perfect decisions spaced out – plus you almost never get enough time for perfection anyway.
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10 minutes with top performers beats 10 hours with your underperformers
This lesson restates the classic 80/20 rule – 20% of our inputs give us 80% of our desired output.
Our best performers get things done, serve clients exceptionally well, and drive economic productivity. Spending time with them should always be our priority.
I have used a concept called the “farm team” – important relationships within our firm that I particularly sought to nurture because the upside is so incredible.
Supporting high performers and removing obstacles yields a far larger return for law firms than hitting the ball and dragging laggard teammates along.
(A better approach would be to help the laggards find another organization where they can win and be successful!)
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Recruiting is 95% rejecting talent that doesn’t fit
As the top leader, one of your most important jobs—if not your most important job—is to build your team.
To do this well, be prepared to reject the vast majority of applicants. Be picky.
We follow a hiring process in our firm described in Who: the A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.
This is one of the most critical systems within our practice.
We rigorously follow this process. But, like anything, it is not perfect.
They don’t put this in the book, but there is definitely some luck involved in hiring.
The idea is to reduce the uncertainty to the smallest number possible when making the decision to give an offer to select a teammate.
Trust your instincts – if something feels off during the interview process, reject fast. While this strict filtering might seem excessive now, it pays dividends over time.
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The value you command is determined by the magnitude of the problems you solve
The free market is a powerful force that ultimately determines how we’re compensated.
While there may be occasional anomalies, over time, the market sorts out lawyer compensation based on the value delivered and the magnitude of problems solved.
You can observe this across any practice area. Governments may try to influence the market, but the invisible hand, so to speak, ultimately evens things out.
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Tenacity beats talent
If there was a way to screen for tenacity, ambition, and drive in hiring, you’d be a billionaire overnight.
It’s what we’ve used to build our firm – surrounding ourselves with teammates who have an intense “get after it” mentality.
We heard it all from lawyers in our peer group. They have said, “Fixed fees wouldn’t work,” “You need more services than just family law,” or “Non-lawyers can’t sell legal services.”
Our team’s tenacity proved the naysayers wrong.
Year after year, we stayed focused until we dialed in the firm’s model.
Tenacity beats talent, pedigree, law school, credentials, and connections every time.
Sometimes tenacity is apparent from day one. Sometimes it emerges later. But it’s consistently been a key differentiator in building and scaling our practice.
These lessons have been hard-won. I hope you can take them, recontextualize them for your practice, and shorten your own success curve.
Keep pushing forward, and don’t be afraid to fail fast and learn faster!
